


Insanity

by genderneutralnoun



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 22:26:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13199844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genderneutralnoun/pseuds/genderneutralnoun





	Insanity

Somewhere, a writer writes.

 

Somewhere, a dragon sits.

 

The writer is tired.

They have been tired for a long, long time. In many different ways; many different meanings of the word ‘tired’. Their head hurts. Their eyes hurt. They should be going to sleep. But sitting up helps stave off the pain, if only in the fact that it is a delusion of wakefulness. 

They have so many things to do.

So many. Not all of them important, some very, very important. Some hurt when they are not doing them. Some sit in the back of their mind, sitting ominous and large like a great toad, seeming to swell slowly with every moment they take their eyes off it. Size is difficult in the mind. Size is difficult in words. Words are all they have.

They care about some things.

Few others around them care about these same things. At least, not the people that matter. No, not the people they must see and feel and assault their senses with every day, nor the people they can curl up near and get drunk off the scent and sound of warm, friendly, beautiful breathing. There’s only really one of the latter, and that one is hard to talk to. 

They feel so unsatisfied.

They feel cursed, even. How? Why, why did they have the luck to be blessed with such raw strength in mind and intellect, in words and imagery, while failing to be anywhere near getting what they need to make use of those skills? They could care less about new things or new tools if it meant they could have the time to not worry, to not worry about wasting time, to spend all the time they needed on resting and only work when they are sure they will give their greatest effort!

 

The dragon is angry.

Angry, angry. Someone must be to blame. Something must be done. There is no rhyme or reason why they should be stuck like this!

The dragon is beautiful.

They have shimmering feathers and a defined, scaled face, ears tipped forward in restrainment and crest bristling in a fluffed mass. Their foreclaws dig into the dirt before them; they’re sitting back on their haunches so the digits on their backpaws spread out wide. Their tail lashes angrily, the feathers flapping out and in to fan the air around them without losing too much velocity. Their shoulders are tense and squared, firm and permanent. They have lost many a battle, but they stand proud and unshaken. 

The more fool, they.

 

The dragon is the writer.

Or, more correctly, the dragon is what the writer once was. What they once were, or their past which they fear, or what they fear they might become; or any combination thereof. Right now, the writer is too tired to be angry, too ugly to be beautiful. Too complicated to be defined by any human terms but sad and pained and lonely and oh so  _ tired; _ any sense of childish honor they once had is lost, a distant memory. They can’t afford honor now. They try, when they can, but it always ends up for the worse.

It hurts. It hurts so much to be like this. Every time they fall or have to bow their head, they break a little more. They’re in so many pieces, they cannot count. Even as they shatter, as the final blow hits and they fall to the ground like a hollow glass statue cut in hundred million places, they know they will have to stand up again. No one has ever let them die. They couldn’t let themself die, even if they wanted to! No, they must pick up the pieces again; each time taking a little longer, each time hurting more as they shatter. No matter how long it is between the falls, they will happen. They always do. 

_ Just keep picking up the pieces. _

It would be easier to give up.

_ Just keep doing what they say. _

It would be so good to leave the world, to laugh in the face of all their ideals and go up in a blaze of glory.

_ Just keep working, little bug. _

But they cannot. They would never. The very idea makes them tremble with repulsion and disgust, and shame, for a means they could never get.

_ I might just be the last one to die. _

What is a moment, if every moment feels like forever?

_ Wouldn’t that be funny. The only immortal person, whose cursed body can only stay upright, and we were doomed before they were born. _

What is history, or memory, if the only thing that is real is the now?

_ The world feels  _ too  _ sharp,  _ too  _ real, to be just a cosmic accident or a sequence set in line by a consciousness unknown. It feels like needles tingling in our skin, like the hot-and-cold of blood moving through our veins, like every sensation that we feel and even those that we shouldn’t be able to magnified to an extent that cannot be calculated. _

It is hard, when the tingling in their arms or the cold of their nose feels the same as their fuzzy socks against their legs or the lapdesk pressing into their thighs, to differentiate themself from the world at all. 

After all, they know,  **we were all stardust in the beginning, and while perhaps not stardust we will return to, we will all become one mass in the end.**

 

**One mass of history and feelings, aged stories and sensations rushing back to each particle as they remember everything they were. And because each particle was everything, and everything was each particle; there we will have everything, all the world, in a single speck of dust.**

**And then, maybe, just maybe, we will finally understand that we never truly split in the first place.**


End file.
